Folk Songs from the Southern Highlands - online songbook

Southern Appalachians songs with lyrics, commentary & some sheet music.

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Ballad and Songs
MASSA HAD A LITTLE YALLER GAL See Newman I. White's American Negro Folk-Songs, pp. 152—155; Scarborough, pp. 66—68; Odum's The Negro and His Songs9 p. 236. The chorus with some variation will be found in "Bile 'Em Cabbage Down," a song in Richardson and Spaeth's American Mountain Songs', p. 88.
Mrs. Henry learned the following fragment in Atlanta, Ga. when she was a child.
1. Massa had a little yaller gal; Brung her from the South; Had her hair done up so tight She could not shut her mouth.
Chorus Bile that cabbage down; Bake them 'taters brown; Look here, yaller gal, I'll have no foolishness! Turn that hoc-cake 'round.
172 LULU
Louise Rank Bascom in "Ballads and Songs of Western North Carolina," Journal, XXII, 248, remarks: "Of the ruder ballads, 'Lulu' is an example, though it is obviously not of mountain origin, from the very fact of the allusion to 'ole Missus'. Still it is probable that many of the stanzas have been invented in the highlands." Cf. Newman I. White, American Negro Folk-Songs, p. 304. See also Reed Smith, The Traditional Ballad and Its South Carolina Survivals, p. 19, in his treatise on "Communal Composition" (reprinted in his South Carolina Ballads, p. 20). Cf. also Scarborough, p. 104.
Obtained from C. L. Franklin, Crossnore, Avery County, North Carolina, July, 1930.
436